Attached is a handout prepared for a high-level meeting with C Level Execs and Managers of various departments. Atari at that time saw itself as a computer company, not just a game company, and we were all very proud of the development of the XL Series Home Computers. I was very proud of this product because of all the work I did. I relished the design of the custom LSI chips, Fred, Porkey, et al, designed and developed with the assistance of my right-hand-man, Robert Card. Bob took over and finished the Porkey chip design to give me more time for the rest of my responsibilities. What I relished even more was doing the product design, and personally arranging for the manufacturing capacity, the negotiations in Asia associated with that, and such details as the revolutionary approach to RF shielding and FCC Certification. I was a combination Product Manager, Project Manager, and Engineering Designer, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Needless to say, I put in countless hours. The 600XL, which this document addresses, was the least expensive and most compact model, and I cherished the possibility of putting that computing package into the hands of as many consumers as possible. That's probably why this document survived my tenure at Atari, while documents for the A1200XL and A1450XL did not - as the low-costed version, this was my favorite.  

The first part of the document would be called "the slides" today. Produced on an IBM Selectric typewriter by my secretary Rise Rosenberg using the Presentation golf-ball/font. Following that is a design document I wrote on my office Atari 800 computer and dot-matrix printer. At the end of the document are the Critical Path (CPM) graphs that were done manually as Atari would not spring for the $35K the CPM software would have cost from PMI (?) Project Management International. At that time CPM was used mainly in construction, and I introduced its use for product development at Atari after taking a crash course at NYU. The timetable was short, and I didn't want to drive myself insane, so I considered using CPM project management essential. I was highly influenced by Fred Brooks' book "The Mythical Man Month".